Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for determining instruction execution history in a debugger.
Description of Related Art
The development of the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (‘EDVAC’) computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
The operation of software applications deployed on modern computing systems can be accessed and analyzed through the use of debuggers and other profiling tools. Debuggers and other profiling tools that analyze program performance and code flow often rely on periodic sampling of program flow. For periodic sampling, the profiler will gather the instruction address or stack traceback on each periodic timer tick. This methodology, however, provides a limited view of program activity as no context is presented to a user identifying how the execution of a program arrived at a given point.